A path to ecological psychology (pre-print version) DOCX

Title	A path to ecological psychology (pre-print version)
Author	Tony Chemero
Pages	5
File Size	28.5 KB
File Type	DOCX
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A path to ecological psychology Anthony Chemero Departments of Philosophy and Psychology Center for Cognition, Action, and Perception Strange Tools Research Lab University of Cincinnati [email protected] 2766 words; 21 citations; 2 possible fgures (forthcoming) When I started working toward my Ph.D. in philosophy and cognitive science, I was already skeptical about mental representation. This skepticism was inherited from my undergraduate mentor Daniel Dennett and, even more so, from his mentor Gilbert Ryle. For this reason, work in robotics by Randy Beer (2000) and Rodney Brooks (1999) was music to my young ears. These two roboticists claimed, and had functioning robots to show, that computational manipulations of representations of the environment actually hinder the development of efective mobile robots. Brooks explicitly claimed that his robots had nothing to do with "German philosophy", but a paper by Beth Preston (1993) convinced me otherwise, and led me to Martin Heidegger, which led me eventually to Maurice Merleau-Ponty. All this occurred while I was still enmeshed in working on philosophical issues in cognitive science. At a certain point, I wondered how Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty would try to do cognitive science. This is what led me to read James Gibson. What led me to become very serious about ecological psychology was a job. I was hired at Franklin and Marshall College in Pennsylvania as a replacement for the great, tragically short-lived ecological psychologist Edward Reed, and I had promised during my interview that I could teach his course called "Ecological Psychology". I spent the six months between being ofered the job and starting it reading Reed and Gibson, trying to make myself into someone who could teach that course. In doing so, I fell in intellectual love. I was in love, yes, but still a philosopher. As Jerry Fodor put it "many philosophers secretly harbor the view that there is something deeply wrong with psychology, but that a philosopher with a little training in the techniques of linguistic analysis and a free afternoon could straighten it out" (1968, vii)1 . My aim was to try to do for ecological psychology what Fodor attempted for cognitive psychology. Neither of us succeeded, but I recount my eforts here, after presenting a little history. James Gibson died in 1979, soon after publishing the Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (1979; EAVP). When it came under immediate attack, including by Fodor (and Pylyshyn 1981), it was left to others to defend Gibson's ideas. Michael Turvey, Robert Shaw, William Mace and Edward Reed (1981) produced a detailed reply to Fodor and Pylyshyn, in which they set out detailed formal and conceptual structures to make Gibson's sometimes impressionistic text into the foundation for a rigorous science. This paper is an undeniable master work and has led to decades of excellent science. But from my point of view, it was problematic in that it interpreted Gibson's text so that it was less compatible with the ideas of Merleau-Ponty. I understood Gibson's project as being aligned with Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological philosophy, an understanding that is partially confrmed by the fact that the archives at Cornell contain Gibson's detailed notes on The Phenomenology of Perception, which he read while writing EAVP (Mace 2014). (Include fgure?) 1 Thanks to Mat Bateman for helping me fnn this quote....